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Overview

Beau Kilmer is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, where he codirects the RAND Drug Policy Research Center. He is also a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His research lies at the intersection of public health and public safety, with a special emphasis on crime control, substance use, illicit markets, and public policy. Some of his current projects include assessing the consequences of alternative marijuana policies; measuring the effect of 24/7 Sobriety programs on drunk driving, domestic violence, and mortality; and evaluating other innovative programs intended to reduce crime. Kilmer's articles have appeared in leading journals such as American Journal of Public Health, Lancet Psychiatry,New England Journal of Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and his commentaries have been published by CNN, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Newsweek, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. His co-authored book on marijuana legalization was published by Oxford University Press and the second edition was released in 2016. He serves as an assistant editor for Addiction and is a trustee of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy. Kilmer received a NHSTA Public Service Award for his “leadership and innovation in the areas of alcohol and drug-impaired driving program and policy research” and his co-authored work on 24/7 Sobriety received honourable mention for the Behavioural Exchange Award for Outstanding Research. Before earning his doctorate at Harvard University, Kilmer received a Judicial Administration Fellowship that supported his work with the San Francisco Drug Court.

Commentary

Californians have a lot to consider when it comes to decriminalizing possession. But now is the time for a rigorous discussion about removing criminal penalties for drug possession, rather than rushing to judgment in the heat of a future election season.

Data lags and the elimination of the ADAM program complicate estimates of U.S. cocaine consumption. New users who haven't yet developed cocaine dependence are also a factor. It may be prudent to start planning for an increase in heavy use even before all of the evidence is in.

The new administration has at least six options for addressing marijuana. These are not mutually exclusive, and each comes with tradeoffs. All six are compatible with a federal approach that encourages discussions about prohibition and its alternatives.

There are many ways to legalize marijuana supply besides the for-profit approach. But to learn what effects various models have, the federal government will have to make it easier for states to implement some middle-ground options.

Setting the cannabis tax should not be considered a one-time event. Smart jurisdictions will revise their decisions over time to incorporate new data about taxes, testing, and the cannabis plant itself — without being influenced by those seeking to maximize profits.

Beau Kilmer, co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center and a co-author of the nonpartisan primer Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know addresses developments in marijuana policy and why reasonable people can disagree about legalization.

Legalizing and allowing profit-maximizing firms to produce, sell, and advertise recreational marijuana would likely increase marijuana consumption. But how would this increased consumption influence the use of other substances?

Marijuana policy is a growing topic of discussion, and laws are starting to change. Ten choices confronting jurisdictions considering legalization cover many of the critical decisions that will determine whether removing prohibition is a good idea.

The marijuana policy landscape changed dramatically in 2014. Legal sales for nonmedical purposes began in Colorado and in Washington state. Voters in Washington, D.C., Alaska, and Oregon passed initiatives to liberalize their marijuana laws. Uruguay also started implementing its marijuana legalization law.

Due to budget concerns the federal government just shut down a critical data source that provides insights into abuse, dependence on, and spending on heroin and other hard drugs like crack and methamphetamine.

Since Colorado and Washington allow profit-maximizing firms to grow and sell marijuana, there is concern they will use advertising to promote consumption by heavy users. With help from the federal government, the states will be better positioned to head off the negative consequences associated with commercialization.

Colorado and Washington will remove the prohibition on commercial marijuana production and distribution for nonmedical purposes and start regulating and taxing it. Not even the Netherlands goes that far, writes Beau Kilmer.

If you want to reduce cocaine consumption and drug-related crime, you get more bang for the buck if you put money into treatment rather than paying for the increase in incarceration produced by federal mandatory minimum sentences, writes Beau Kilmer.

Driving Mexican marijuana out of the U.S. would probably reduce the traffickers' export revenue by a few billion dollars a year, writes Beau Kilmer. But would reducing that revenue lead to a corresponding decrease in trafficker violence?

Policymakers in Washington and Colorado are confronting some new and tricky issues that have never been addressed. For them, and for anyone else thinking about changing their pot laws, there are seven key decision areas that will shape the costs and benefits of marijuana legalization.

Beau Kilmer, codirector of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center, discusses South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety Project, which requires those arrested for or convicted of alcohol-related offenses to take twice-a-day breathalyzer tests or wear a continuous monitoring bracelet. Those who fail or skip their tests are immediately subject to modest sanctions—typically a day or two in jail.

This November, Washington state, Oregon, and Colorado voters will consider ballot measures to legalize the production, distribution, and possession of marijuana for nonmedical purposes. Even if voters pass these measures at the state level, marijuana will still be prohibited by the federal government, writes Beau Kilmer.

The illicit drug trade is the ultimate value-added chain. As cocaine and heroin make their perilous journeys from the fields of Colombia and Afghanistan to markets in U.S. and European cities, each border crossed and each trafficker involved adds dollars to a price, write Beau Kilmer And Peter Reuter.

Empowering those under criminal justice supervision to cease drug use on their own - rather than forcing them into formal treatment against their will - is a policy approach that warrants further evaluation.

Legalizing recreational use of marijuana comes with a host of policy decisions, including how to regulate the supply, pricing, and access to the drug, and how to approach public health messaging on substance abuse prevention.

Respondent-driven sampling -- a peer-driven method of recruiting hidden populations -- can be used to create a representative sample of a drug market's users; the sample can then be surveyed to discern the effects of a Drug Market Intervention.

This process evaluation describes how well seven jurisdictions adhered to a Bureau of Justice Assistance strategy to reduce overt drug markets, along with the barriers they encountered and lessons learned from their experiences.

This paper uses respondent-driven sampling (RDS) of drug users in a mid-sized American city to estimate the shares of cocaine (powder and crack) users and expenditures that are attributable to different combinations of these groups.

Marijuana policy should not be viewed as a binary choice between prohibition and the for-profit commercial model seen in Colorado and Washington. Legalization encompasses a wide range of possible regimes.

Marijuana legalization is a controversial and multifaceted issue. This report provides a foundation for thinking about the consequences of different marijuana policy options while being explicit about the uncertainties involved.

The halving of the cocaine market in five years and the parallel (but independent) large rise in daily/near-daily marijuana use are major events that were not anticipated by the expert community and raise important theoretical, research, and policy issues.

Harmonizing measurement of drug policy indicators, such as prevalence of use, problematic use, and drug enforcement, would help improve cross-national comparisons of how nations deal with illicit drugs.

In 2009, San Francisco opened the Community Justice Center (CJC), a community court serving a high-crime area. This report examines whether the CJC reduces the risk of rearrest when compared to more traditional approaches for addressing arrestees.

Various surveys now ask respondents to describe their most recent purchase of illicit drugs, as one mechanism through which market size can be estimated. This raises the question of whether issues surrounding the timing of survey administration might make a sample of most recent purchases differ from a random sample of all purchases.

Government agencies in Colorado and Washington are now charged with granting production and processing licenses and developing regulations for legal marijuana, and other states and countries may follow.

Using data from 2000 to 2010, RAND researchers estimated the number of users, expenditures, and consumption for four illicit drugs: cocaine (including crack), heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine (meth).

RAND researchers generated national estimates of the total number of users, total expenditures, and total consumption for four illicit drugs from 2000 to 2010: cocaine (including crack), heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine.

Swift-certain-fair sanctioning helps enforce the conditions of community corrections by substituting swiftness and certainty for severity and by increasing the predictability and perceived fairness of the process from the offender's viewpoint.

This study provides a multinational overview of cannabis production regimes, with a special focus on identifying and describing official statements and/or legal decisions made about production regimes for non-medical and non-scientific purposes.

This report estimates the total weight of marijuana consumed in Washington state in 2013 -- the last year before legalized commercial sale of marijuana -- in order to provide decisionmakers with baseline information about the size of the state's market.

In November 2012, Washington state and Colorado took the unprecedented step of legalizing commercial production and sale of cannabis for adult use, but all cannabis-related activities remain prohibited under the federal Controlled Substances Act.

Data from surveys of arrestees and the household population in the U.S. suggest there is only modest overlap among demand for the big three expensive illegal drugs (cocaine/crack, heroin, and methamphetamine).

This report demonstrates how cannabis prices increase across the supply chain in the EU as distributors take additional mark ups to compensate themselves not only for shipping costs but also for the risks they assume.

In 2005, the state of South Dakota introduced an innovative approach to reduce problem drinking. Known as the 24/7 Sobriety Project. The program requires individuals arrested for or convicted of alcohol-involved offenses to submit to breathalyzer tests twice per day or wear an alcohol monitoring bracelet at all times.

South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety Project, in which individuals with alcohol-involved offenses submit to breathalyzer tests twice per day or wear an alcohol monitoring bracelet at all times, reduced repeat DUI arrests at the county level by 12 percent.

This paper provides a nonpartisan primer on U.S. drug use and drug policy. It aims to bring those new to drug policy up to speed and provide ideas to researchers and potential funders about how they could make strong contributions to the field.

How legalizing marijuana would affect consumption and tax revenues will depend on many design choices including tax level, incentives for a continued black market, whether advertising is restricted, and how the regulatory system is designed and adjusted.

Trajectories of drug use are usually studied empirically by following over time persons sampled from either the general population (most often youth and young adults) or from heavy or problematic users (e.g., arrestees or those in treatment).

The large cross-school variation in the cost of implementing Project CHOICE (a voluntary after-school prevention program for adolescents) highlights the importance of collecting cost information from multiple sites.

The European Commission seeks to develop a European Crime Report (ECR) to improve understanding of the EU crime and justice situation. RAND Europe researched the analytical and operational challenges and opportunities to developing an ECR.

If all veterans suffering from major depression and posttraumatic stress disorder were to receive evidence-based treatments, policy simulations suggest that cost savings generated would be $138 million (15 percent) over two years.

The authors review two general approaches to drug market estimation--supply-side and demand-side--before turning to a more specific analysis of studies that measure the size of the U.S. marijuana market.

This study provides descriptive information about 1,655 applicants in California who sought a physician's recommendation for medical marijuana, the conditions for which they sought treatment, and the diagnoses made by the physicians.

Legalizing marijuana in California would lead to a substantial decline in price, but there is much uncertainty about legalization's effect on public budgets and consumption; even minor changes in assumptions lead to major differences in outcomes.

Legalizing marijuana in California would lead to a substantial decline in price, but there is much uncertainty about legalization's effect on public budgets and consumption; even minor changes in assumptions lead to major differences in outcomes.

To better understand illegal drug markets and supply-reduction efforts in the European Union, data on purity-adjusted prices must be collected. Member states can learn more about supply reduction by changing how they report seizure data.

Describes how the British Government's narrower focus of problem drug use on most significant harms may be useful, but carries risks and drawbacks. We find the UK Drug Strategy draws on robust evidence for drug treatment and drug-related crime.

Based on literature, expert insights, and a conceptual framework, this study identifies a number of recommendations for improving the understanding of illicit drug markets, supply reduction efforts, and drug-related crime in the EU.

This report presents a conceptual framework for constructing an estimate of the global cost of drug use. However, we conclude that it is not possible at this time to develop a meaningful comparative estimate of the cost of drug use across countries.

This report provides key findings of the RAND Europe study which assesses how the global market for illicit drugs has developed from 1998 to 2007 and describes worldwide drug policies implemented during that period to address the problem.

The economic cost of methamphetamine use reached more than an estimated $23 billion in 2005, mostly from the intangible burden that addiction places on dependent users and their premature mortality and from crime and criminal justice costs.

The first national estimate of the economic cost of methamphetamine considers burdens of addiction, early death, drug treatment, lost productivity, crime and criminal justice, health care, production and environmental hazards, and child endangerment.

California's Proposition 36 and Arizona's Proposition 200 allowed some drug-abusing criminal offenders to enter drug treatment instead of being incarcerated. This policy brief provides early results of the two programs.

Game theory and other simulations show that, if potential criminal offenders are sufficiently deterrable, increasing the conditional probability of punishment (given violation) can reduce the amount of punishment actually inflicted, by "tipping" a situation from its high-violation equilibrium to its low-violation equilibrium.

The U.K. National Audit Office (NAO) commissioned RAND Europe to conduct this review to identify and synthesize international research about the effectiveness of community orders in reducing re-offending.

Despite the ubiquity of drug testing in criminal justice settings, there is little experimental evidence suggesting that testing reduces drug use or engenders pro-social behavior. This paper estimates the effect of parolee drug testing on labor and education outcomes with data from a randomized experiment involving 1,958 young parolees.

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